The population of end users who benefit from the use of OGC standards today is global - much to the credit of the growing complement of geospatial technology practitioners in organizations who have been advancing OGC standards as members. As our members envisioned, uptake of OGC standards is now sufficient to make further deployment inevitable. In one user domain after another, "it just makes sense" to extend standards-based Internet and Web resources with geospatial data and processing services. It's not hard. It just requires using software equipped with interfaces that implement OGC's open standards.

The following represent just a few examples of the capabilities and benefits being reaped as a result of implementing OGC standards. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (http://sis.agr.gc.ca/cansis/systems/online_maps.html) is not an OGC member, but its website features a growing number of interactive mapping applications that implement OGC standards. SLEWS (http://www.slews.de/index_en.php), a prototype Landslide Monitoring and Early Warning System, is being developed in Germany by a team that includes just one OGC member. Dan Mandl, EO-1 Mission Manager at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, sees cost savings and flexibility that enable his team to do more despite a shrinking budget. Kylie Armstrong, Manager, Business Programs, Landgate, Western Australia, sees no other way to effectively access and fuse data from multiple agencies for decision making in Western Australia. Andrew Terhorst at CSIRO's Tasmanian ICT Centre is implementing a hydrological sensor web on OGC's open platform, and this is enabling much faster and more comprehensive observation, understanding and prediction of water quality and floods and droughts. Stewart Robinson, energy resources consultant, Energy Development Unit, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, United Kingdom, oversees a transition to XML-based forms for geospatial data, and OGC provides the required international standards. In these countries and in many other countries, agencies at lower levels of government are following the lead of federal agencies, resulting in the coherent National Spatial Data Infrastructures that were first envisioned twenty years ago.

In virtually all such situations, one motivating factor is that governments and businesses are trying to manage on reduced budgets. OGC standards are helping organizations extend the lives of legacy systems, quickly deploy new capabilities, and acquire service components that previously were available only as part of expensive multi-feature packages.

Benefits have been carefully documented in at least two studies. The 2005 "Geospatial Interoperability Return on Investment Study" by Booz Allen Hamilton for the NASA Geospatial Interoperability Office showed that there is a significant improvement when using open standards over proprietary standards. The project in the study that implemented geospatial interoperability standards had a risk-adjusted ROI, or "Savings to Investment," ratio of 119.0% over the 5 year project life cycle. This project saved 26.2% compared to the project that relied upon a proprietary standard. And a 2007 study by the Centre of Land Policy and Valuations of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya showed that the initial investment to set up the IDEC SDI was recovered in just 4 months, or 6 months if the operating costs for 2004-05 are also included. The mix of OGC standards and web services helped them to meet their goals and accelerate payback of costs.

Technology offerors are benefiting as well - now able to compete in markets that they were previously "locked out of" because customers' choices were limited by proprietary interfaces and encodings.

OGC has continued to grow throughout the current recession. This trend shows that our standards as well as our proven, repeatable processes have value during hard times. Agencies and businesses seeking improved interoperability in technology domains and application domains see OGC as the fastest, cheapest, best and often the only way to solve their geospatial interoperability problems. As more domains become spatially enabled, the remaining areas of non-interoperability become the focus of attention. And as awareness grows, people see the connection between geospatial interoperability and cost savings in other domains like urban planning, mortgage and real estate, climate change and smart grid.

I encourage visitors to our website to look at our new "Endorsements" page (http://www.opengeospatial.org/ogc/quotes), which includes comments from just a few of the user organizations that have embraced OGC standards. And, once again, I encourage readers to consider expanding this page by providing an image and brief paragraph to help build public awareness of the value that our standards and processes are providing.

- Mark Reichardt, President and CEO

SAM BACHARACH LEAVES OGC STAFF POSITION

Sam Bacharach recently resigned his position as Executive Director of Outreach and Community Adoption to work in industry on projects that involve implementation of OGC standards. We thank Sam for his leadership and dedication to the Consortium mission, and for his extended periods of travel worldwide to raise awareness and use of OGC standards.

On the Python geospatial theme, on October 1 the Linfiniti Geo blog shared a quick guide to getting up and running with PyWPS. ... From the introduction: "PyWPS is a great project by Jachym Cepicky and Intevation to provide an open (Open Source and Open Standards) implementation of the OGC Web Processing Service spec." (Found on slashgeo.)

On September 15, on the Semantic Community wiki, Gary Berg-Cross (garybc) posted a good overview of the GeoSpatial Ontology Framework and Reference Model. The post begins, "One of the goals of the SOCoP (Spatial Ontology Community of Practice) in 2009 is to develop a framework and reference model for geospatial semantic ontologies and applications."

On 14 September, Jeff Harrison posted "USGIN - Cyberinfrastructure for Earth sciences." This network for the sharing of geoscience data uses such OGC standards as Catalog Service for the Web (CSW), Web Map Services and Web Feature Services (WMS and WFS).

Gene Roe, who blogs about lidar, on 26 August posted "Towards a Common Architecture." Noting that the number one complaint he hears from users is that every lidar scanner requires the user to use the manufacturer's software, whereas users want interoperability. He suggests that OGC provides a model: "The OGC brings users and vendors together to work on common architectures and platforms. Isn't that exactly what needs to happen?"

Also on 26 August, Kris Geusebroek posted "Open Source GIS experiences," about developing an application "for an emergency phone call center to show the position of the caller on a map." The project involved GeoServer's implementation of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Map Service (WMS) standards.

On August 26, Richard Marsden commented on his Geoweb Guru blog that the OGC Network "Learn" pages "could be come a very useful resource if the OGC Network Learn pages are kept up to date."

Andrew Turner blogged on 5 August about "GeoWeb Standards - Where we are." Among many interesting statements, he said that OGC dominates the landscape of interface standards. Re WMS and WFS, a positive is that 'both provide very full-featured capabilities" while a difficulty is that "the service description is at the same endpoint as the service itself."

If you haven't seen it yet, take a look at slashgeo, a geospatial take-off on the slashdot "news for nerds" service. You can easily peruse slashgeo's aggregated OGC entries in the geo-blogosphere.

OGC IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Bookmarking

[the following is reprinted from the November 2008 newsletter.]

An effort is underway to make OGC documents more accessible to everyone. The idea is to navigate OGC documents using Delicious. Contribute by tagging your own important OGC documents with ogcdoc, plus other keywords such as {filter georss gml owc ows sas sdi sensorml sld sos styling swe wcs wfs wmc wms wps}. More details are available at http://www.ogcnetwork.net/ogcdoc. To see documents that have already been bookmarked and tagged, go to http://delicious.com/tag/ogcdoc.

Twitter

George Arnold of the US National Institute of Standards (NIST) is National Coordinator for the US smart grid standards effort. Shortly after Mark Reichardt's opinion piece, Space, Time, and the Smart Grid's Neighboring Worlds, appeared in Smart Grid News, Arnold sent this tweet to alert people to the importance of geospatial standards as a cross-cutting issue for the smart grid standards effort.

The US Geological Survey (USGS), as a key agent for development of the National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI), has focused on seven core "Framework Data" themes considered to be of critical importance to the NSDI -

geodata.gov is a geographic information system (GIS) portal, also known as the Geospatial One-Stop (GOS), that serves as a public gateway for improving access to geospatial information and data under the Geospatial One-Stop E-Government initiative.

Geospatial One-Stop (GOS) - "implements the basic elements of the NSDI by providing an Internet portal (www.geodata.gov) to facilitate data sharing for decision support systems and by encouraging partnerships across organizations."

The National Map (TNM) - "integrates base geographic data in partnership with content producers at all levels."

Some of these implement the OGC Web Map Service (WMS) interface to enable Web applications to request graphical images of data. But now, in one of the first Web service based projects to distribute US national data sets, the USGS is offering prototype Framework Web Feature Services. Selected Framework data themes - Hydrography, Transportation and Governmental Units - have been redeployed by the USGS from their native database formats to services that implement the OGC Web Feature Service (WFS) Interface Standard and Geography Markup Language Encoding Standard for Simple Features (GMLsf) as well as the FGDC/ANSI Geographic Information Framework Data Content Standards. These services provide query and retrieval of specific Framework features and their attributes in a standard form. The query and retrieval can be performed by any Geographic Information System (GIS) or other geospatial application equipped with Web service interfaces that implement the same OGC standards. In addition, a Web Map Service (WMS) is provided to allow users to visualize the data content as a graphical image.

The NSDI Framework Data Services also includes a Prototype WFS Gazetteer (WFS-G) consistent with ISO 19112 and GML Simple Features Profile (GMLsf) Level 0. The gazetteer gives users the ability to navigate through the available Framework Data using place names that correspond to or have a relationship to the GML-encoded spatial features.

The current effort is an outgrowth of a National Spatial Data Infrastructure (NSDI) Cooperative Agreement Program (CAP) project and is a collaboration of geoLeaders, CubeWerx, The Carbon Project, EPA and USGS.

This project is an important step towards fulfilling the vision of the NSDI as an operational set of NSDI Framework Data Services - a "system of systems" - based on ANSI and OGC standards.

NEWS ITEMS

DGI Europe offers 15% discount for OGC Members!

DGI Europe 2010, the 6th Annual European Geospatial Intelligence Conference & Exhibition, will be held 25-28 January, 2010 at the QEII Centre London, United Kingdom. Defence Geospatial Intelligence (DGI) is Europe's largest annual gathering dedicated to high-level discussion addressing the major challenges of the defence and government geospatial intelligence community. As a supporter of DGI 2010, the OGC has negotiated an exclusive 15% discount for OGC members. Request the full agenda and find out more about your discount by mentioning 'MOGC' when you call the DGI Team (+44 (0) 20 7368 9465) or email them (dgi [at] wbr.co.uk) or register online at www.dgieurope.com.

Carl Reed inducted into URISA's GIS Hall of Fame

Dr. Carl Reed, the CTO and Executive Director of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Standards Program, has been inducted into the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA) GIS Hall of Fame.

NBII Program Strategy: OGC Standards

The National Biological Information Infrastructure (NBII) Program has developed a Geospatial Interoperability Framework (NBII-GIF or GIF) strategy based on International Standards Organization (ISO) standards and Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) specifications, integrated with the core NBII Framework standards and protocols such as Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) protocol, with data content and metadata standards.

OGC enters Smart Grid standards effort

The "smart grid" refers to modernizing electric power grids by "using bits to manage electrons and manage markets in electrons". It is a key component of national energy efficiency and renewable energy efforts worldwide. This year, along with many other standards development organizations (SDOs), OGC has participated in Smart Grid Standards Roadmap Workshops organized by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) (http://www.nist.gov/smartgrid/). NIST's fast-paced initiative has significant US federal backing.

Geospatial is a requirement that cuts across virtually all smart grid application scenarios, and information about smart grid devices will need to be accessed for activities such as emergency management and facilities management. Therefore it is important that the various SDOs use OGC standards for geospatial encodings and interfaces. OGC staff and NIST staff have met to discuss ways that OGC can help NIST meet its goals. At the smart grid ad hoc meeting at the TC meetings in Darmstadt this year, OGC members encouraged staff to pursue a smart grid agenda, and a smart grid ad hoc meeting was held at the TC meetings in Mountain View in December. There, OGC members agreed to hold a Smart Grid ad hoc meeting at the March 2010 TC meeting in Frascati, Italy. For more information about the OGC's smart grid activities, contact Louis Hecht (lhecht [at] opengeospatial.org ), OGC's Director, Business Development.

OGC in the News

On 18 May, GIS Weekly published "Open Geospatial Consortium Update," providing its readers an overview of coming events (the summits in Boston), the AECOO-1 testbed results, newly released discussion papers, newly formed working groups, and an introduction to the OGC Network website, including its "learn" page.

"GeoWebCache Takes the Ouch out of Tile Caching" appeared in GIS Weekly on 4 May. The lead developer talked about the motivation behind GeoWebCache and plans for the product in the future. The WMS, WFS and KML standards and the candidate WMTS standard are mentioned.

The May issue of GIS Development includes a 4-page autobiography of Dr. Robert Moses, member of OGC's Board of Directors and recently elected Chairman of OGC's Advisory Council. He recounts his path from medicine to computers and remote sensing software, and includes a section on the importance of interoperability and the creation of OGC in 1994.

The May issue of GIS Development also includes a report on Map Middle East, held in Abu Dhabi in late April. OGC President Mark Reichardt chaired the Symposium on Design and Engineering.

The May issue of Sensors and Transducers Journal includes "Sensors & Transducers Journal: Frequently Downloaded Articles." The statistics for the month of April 2009 show that the fourth-most-frequently-downloaded article was "OGC® Sensor Web Enablement Standards" by George Percivall, OGC's Executive Director, Interoperability Architecture and Carl Reed, PhD, OGC's Chief Technology Officer, with 114 downloads for the month. The article was published in September 2006 and often has been downloaded more than 100 times a month. As the sensor web continues to grow the article is likely to remain on this list.

The Spring issue of the Journal of Building Information Modeling includes "The USC School of Cinematic Arts: The Arrival of Spring in the Facilities Industry" on pages 16-17. The article mentions OGC's coordination of the AECOO-1 testbed.

Directions Magazine on 6 April published "The Evolution of Geospatial Technology Calls for Changes in Geospatial Research, Education and Government Management." OGC's Chairman David Schell and his co-authors Prof. Mike Jackson and Prof. D. R. Fraser Taylor have written a thought-provoking essay. They describe how geospatial research is done today, how academia deals with geotechnology, and how governments manage spatial data infrastructure. Then they provide a vision / recommendation of how research, education and government can be done, now that the internet and interoperable standards are ubiquitous. Three key points:

data should be published; publication will enable more effective and efficient science;

Interoperability Science should be developed as an academic discipline;

governance of spatial data infrastructures should receive more attention at higher levels of government.

Government Technology published "Maine Invests in Collaborative Web Mapping" on 2 April. The Maine Office of GIS (MEGIS), in cooperation with the Maine Library of Geographic Information (GeoLibrary), has developed an open web mapping service (WMS) platform to publish several terabytes of digital aerial photos collected by municipalities. Even with very little promotion, the service started receiving 2000-3000 hits per day, and requests from municipalities to add their data.

On 1 April, GeoWorld published "True Spatial Data Interoperability: New Tools Are Turning a Dream into Reality," which identifies two key challenges to interoperability: syntax and semantics. The European Union's INSPIRE project is an example of a spatial data infrastructure project that demonstrates the importance of interoperability. In INSPIRE, OGC's GML is the specified syntax for data sharing.

On 1 April, GeoWorld also published "Reflected in Water: OGC's Global Mission and Challenges" by OGC's President and CEO Mark Reichardt. It highlights the work of OGC members to advance standards for improved interoperability of scientific and research activities involving ocean science, hydrology and climate.

The editor introduced the April issue of GIM International with remarks about the Immaturity of Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs). Interoperability and standards are common problems in SDI development, and that observation served as the transition to mention of the issue's interview with OGC's CEO and President, Mark Reichardt, "The Great Standardisation Payoff." In recognition of OGC's fifteenth anniversary, some questions covered history — what role the OGC played in the aftermath of 9/11, how membership has grown. Topics also included how OGC is funded and why it makes standards available for free, and the benefits of membership and advantages of interoperability. Some questions focused on the future — plans to reach out to South America and Africa, and the work of OGC members on security and access issues.

On 31 March, the editorial in GeoWorld, "Interoperability: A Word Befitting its Importance," highlights OGC and standards as part of the issue's topic, interoperability, and points out that all the work being done to facilitate interoperability signals the importance of the geospatial technologies worldwide.

The Winter 2009 issue of Imaging Notes includes "Web Services for Imaging Workflow: Chaining" by OGC's Executive Director of Outreach and Community Adoption, Sam Bacharach. The ORCHESTRA project is identified as using chaining, in which a web service calls a web service. In the experimental setting of the OGC Web Services - 6 (OWS-6) testbed activity, a Geoprocessing Workflow thread "involves service chaining with particular emphasis on ensuring authenticity, integrity, quality and confidentiality of services and information in OWS service chains."

The March issue of GIS Development carried an article by OGC's Director of Business Development, Louis Hecht, "Integration - key to optimization." Topics include building information models, the Delhi Transportation/Routing Interoperability (DTRIP) Pilot Initiative, CityGML and the AECOO testbed.

And the March issue of GIS Development carried "A mega confluence of global experts." This report on the Map World Forum held in February identifies OGC's President and CEO Mark Reichardt as a member of the panel that discussed "Public Private Partnership: Challenges and Opportunities," and identifies OGC as recipient of a GIS Development Geospatial Excellence Award in the category of Professional Societies for its outstanding services/contribution to geospatial community worldwide.